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  • H. Peter Anvin's avatar
    kernel: Replace timeconst.pl with a bc script · 70730bca
    H. Peter Anvin authored
    
    
    bc is the standard tool for multi-precision arithmetic.  We switched
    to Perl because akpm reported a hard-to-reproduce build hang, which
    was very odd because affected and unaffected machines were all running
    the same version of GNU bc.
    
    Unfortunately switching to Perl required a really ugly "canning"
    mechanism to support Perl < 5.8 installations lacking the Math::BigInt
    module.
    
    It was recently pointed out to me that some very old versions of GNU
    make had problems with pipes in subshells, which was indeed the
    construct used in the Makefile rules in that version of the patch;
    Perl didn't need it so switching to Perl fixed the problem for
    unrelated reasons.  With the problem (hopefully) root-caused, we can
    switch back to bc and do the arbitrary-precision arithmetic naturally.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
    Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarSam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz>
    70730bca